Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them.”

— George Orwell

302. “The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.”

— George Orwell

303. “Ignorance and prejudice are the ballast of our ship of state – however, ships without ballast are not seaworthy and cannot sail in the tempests, nor reach a safe harbor.”

— George Orwell

304. “Some things ARE true, even though the party says they are true.”

— George Orwell

305. “They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.”

— George Orwell

306. “Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.”

— George Orwell

307. “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.”

— George Orwell

308. “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

— George Orwell

309. “The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.”

— George Orwell

310. “The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.”

— George Orwell

311. “The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.”

— George Orwell

312. “We make you pay for the water you drink, for the food you eat, for the wars we need, for the crimes we commit. We make you dedicate the most important part of your life to us, but we give you wages and tell you they allow you to buy stuff and pay for your needs to make us richer. We call this freedom.”

— George Orwell

313. “Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.”

— George Orwell

314. “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”

— George Orwell

315. “Sentimental, you say? Anti-social? Oughtn’t to prefer trees to men? I say it depends what trees and what men.”

— George Orwell

316. “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

— George Orwell

317. “Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.”

— George Orwell

318. “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.”

— George Orwell

319. “All nationalistic distinctions – all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect – are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.”

— George Orwell

320. “We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.”

— George Orwell

321. “Writing a novel is agony.”

— George Orwell

322. “Four legs good, two legs bad.’ This, he said, contained the essential principle of Animalism.”

— George Orwell

323. “One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting.”

— George Orwell

324. “He said that the education of the young was more important than anything that could be done for those who are already grown up.”

— George Orwell

325. “I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?”

— George Orwell

326. “It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.”

— George Orwell

327. “After 40, a man is responsible for his face.”

— George Orwell

328. “He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend.”

— George Orwell

329. “Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than just ribbons?”

— George Orwell

330. “There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word – Man.”

— George Orwell

331. “A peace that is truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.”

— George Orwell

332. “On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

— George Orwell

333. “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”

— George Orwell

334. “Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners.”

— George Orwell

335. “What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government.”

— George Orwell

336. “When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don’t have to ask whose side I’m on.”

— George Orwell

337. “In Newspeak there is no word for ‘Science’. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc.”

— George Orwell

338. “The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.”

— George Orwell

339. “Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, ‘mass sadism’, the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs.”

— George Orwell

340. “Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy.”

— George Orwell

341. “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”

— George Orwell

342. “Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”

— George Orwell

343. “When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist – after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.”

— George Orwell

344. “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.”

— George Orwell

345. “It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.”

— George Orwell

346. “To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.”

— George Orwell

347. “Myths which are believed in tend to become true.”

— George Orwell

348. “Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.”

— George Orwell

349. “The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”

— George Orwell

350. “What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.”

— George Orwell